I love this city and this coun­try when you can email the May­or of the cap­i­tal, get a rea­soned (if delayed) response and have things hap­pen.

This is the fol­low-up from Ker­ry Pren­der­gast regard­ing my ques­tion of how Welling­ton City Coun­cil is going to par­tic­i­pate in this year’s Earth Hour:

Dear Mike

Thank you for your email of 10 Jan­u­ary regard­ing Earth Hour.

I’m sor­ry it has tak­en a while to reply. We need­ed to wait until every­one returned from hol­i­day to dis­cuss the idea and make a deci­sion.

You will be hap­py to hear that the Coun­cil is going to par­tic­i­pate.

We are look­ing at get­ting the whole city involved. Cer­tain­ly, for safe­ty rea­sons, we will keep street lights, traf­fic lights and oth­er essen­tial light­ing switched on — and obvi­ous­ly there’ll be sit­u­a­tions where peo­ple will have to keep lights on.

But, the Coun­cil will switch off the tree lights in Ori­en­tal Bay; we’ll make sure all Coun­cil build­ings are “switched off” — and we hope busi­ness­es might fol­low suit and switch off large neon signs and the like.

Thanks for tak­ing the time to send the infor­ma­tion.  We too hope it will serve to gen­er­ate more thought and aware­ness about cli­mate change, both local­ly and glob­al­ly.

Yours sin­cere­ly
Ker­ry Pren­der­gast

Wicked — and I’m sure Ray Api­hene-Mer­cer helped out

And very quick­ly in response to my ques­tion of “Will there be any pub­lic­i­ty (to Welling­ton com­pa­nies espe­cial­ly) to let them know how they can help?”, this from Sharon Williams, (Senior Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Advi­sor, Office of the May­or):

Hi Mike

Ker­ry just asked me to respond to your lat­est email. I can con­firm that we will be putting out a media release encour­ag­ing indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es in Welling­ton to sup­port Earth Hour. I will make sure you receive a copy so you can pub­li­cise it on your blog.

Regards
Sharon

What can I say — pret­ty cool eh!

And now it’s your turn — SATURDAY 29th MARCH, 8pm-9pm — turn off every­thing you can but start with the lights.